Writing Awards
The anthology will launch online in three issues during spring 2010, each featuring poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and artwork from the contributing journals. Each issue will feature a prize-winning poem, story, or essay selected by well-known practitioners in their respective fields. Prizes of $250 will be awarded in each of the three writing genres. Judges are April Bernard for poetry, Susan Cheever for nonfiction, and C. Michael Curtis for fiction.
April Bernard
Poetry Judge
April Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Romanticism, her fourth book of poems, has recently been published by W.W. Norton. Her previous books of poems are Blackbird Bye Bye (1989, Random House; winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets), Psalms (1998), and Swan Electric (2003), both from W.W. Norton. Norton also published her novel, Pirate Jenny, in 1990. Ms. Bernard has contributed essays, reviews, and travel pieces to The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, and Vanity Fair, and has also written screenplays and plays. She was educated at Harvard, worked for more than a decade in book and magazine publishing in New York City, and has taught at Barnard, Yale, Columbia, Amherst, and Bennington colleges. She received a 2003-2004 Guggenheim fellowship in poetry and the 2006 Stover Memorial Prize in Poetry. She is currently director of creative writing at Skidmore College.
C. Michael Curtis
Fiction Judge
C. Michael Curtis is fiction editor of The Atlantic, where he has worked for forty-six years. He also shares with his wife, Elizabeth Cox, the John C. Cobb Chair in the Humanities at Wofford College. He is the editor of six other story collections, including God: Stories and Faith: Stories (Houghton Mifflin) and has published poetry, reviews, and essays in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The National Review, and many other publications.
Susan Cheever
Nonfiction Judge
Susan Cheever's biography of Louisa May Alcott will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2010. Her previous book, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008 and is in its third printing. American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau:Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work was published by Simon & Schuster in 2006, and was on the Boston Globe bestseller list for three months. My Name is Bill: Bill Wilson, His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous was published by Simon & Schuster in 2004. Ms. Cheever is also the author of As Good As I Could Be: A Memoir of Raising Wonderful Children in Difficult Times (Simon & Schuster, 2001), Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker (Simon & Schuster, 1999), A Woman's Life: A Story of an Ordinary Woman and Her Extraordinary Generation (Morrow), Treetops: A Family Memoir (Bantam, 1991), and Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter (Houghton Mifflin, 1984). She has also published five novels, including Looking for Work, A Handsome Man, and Doctors and Women. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and as a weekly column in Newsday, and she has contributed to many other magazines and anthologies. Her work has been nominated for a National Book Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Authors Guild Council and a director of the Yaddo Corporation. Ms. Cheever took a B.A. from Brown and has taught at Yale, Hunter College, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.
Visit her website: http://www.susancheever.com/.